Title: Making Space for Indigenous Literatures

Friday, October 19, 2018 | 2:30 PM —5:30 PM

SFU Harbour Centre | Room 3000

Schedule of Events:

2:30 – 3:30pm: “As I Remember It”: Teachings (Ɂəms tɑɁɑw) from the Life of a Sliammon Elder — A new open source K-12 interdisciplinary resource.

Paige Raibmon (UBC) and Liz Krieg (Aboriginal Enhancement)This new, interdisciplinary, open source k-12 resource draws from the life history, traditional knowledge, and Elders’ teachings as shared by Elsie Paul, one of the book’s authors, and knowledge keeper from the Tla’amin Nation. Historian Paige Raibmon and Indigenous Education Teacher Elizabeth Krieg will introduce the features of this innovative resource and provide examples of its potential use in a range of grades and subjects. They will likewise discuss strategies for and answer questions around shifting epistemologies and pedagogy in public education.

Recoding Relations: Indigenous New Media is a new collection of work on Indigenous new media and digital storytelling, which will be digitally published with Wilfrid Laurier University Press (WLUP) in partnership with UBC Press. The digital collection, which will be built on the Scalar platform, will be part of WLUP’s Indigenous literature series as a sister text to Learn, Teach, Challenge: Approaching Indigenous Literatures (2016), a collection of classic and newly commissioned essays about the study of Indigenous literatures, and Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories from Turtle Island (2017), a critical reader of 47 Indigenous short stories and essays from North America. The goal of this project is to highlight the important contributions that Indigenous storytellers, artists, programmers, and scholars are making in digital spaces with games, social media, interactive website, podcasts, machinima, and augmented and virtual realities. As the online world shifts and Indigenous perspectives gain greater prominence there is are growing opportunities for appropriation and therefore a growing need to hold space for the Indigenous peoples in the digital.

Part survey of the field of Indigenous literary studies, part cultural history, and part literary polemic, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter asserts the vital significance of literary expression to the political, creative, and intellectual efforts of Indigenous peoples today. In considering the connections between literature and lived experience, this book contemplates four key questions at the heart of Indigenous kinship traditions: How do we learn to be human? How do we become good relatives? How do we become good ancestors? How do we learn to live together? Blending personal narrative and broader historical and cultural analysis with close readings of key creative and critical texts, Justice argues that Indigenous writers engage with these questions in part to challenge settler-colonial policies and practices that have targeted Indigenous connections to land, history, family, and self. More importantly, Indigenous writers imaginatively engage the many ways that communities and individuals have sought to nurture these relationships and project them into the future.